Moore was right - Nokia chief says his Law will last

Moore's Law - which first appeared in 1965 and says that the number of transistors per integrated circuit will double every 18 months - will hold true for another 30 years.

That at least is the view of Yrjö Neuvo, CTO of Nokia Mobile Phones, despite a widespread assumption that it will only remain applicable until 2010.

Neuvo, speaking at an electronics conference in Helsinki, said that altering the basic physics of chip design in a way engineers and computer scientists once thought impossible could postpone the inevitable end of Moore's Law.

He gave Motorola's new semiconductor technology, providing cheaper chips, as an example of the latest developments.

It has been widely believed that sometime in the next 10 years the pace of chip development will slow because engineers can't squeeze any more circuits on a chip.

Gordon Moore - the former chairman of Intel - himself once said that he thought miniaturisation would reach its limits in 2017 and bring an end to the law he created.

However, Neuvo also demonstrated an old Nokia 1011 at the conference and reminded the audience that it had over 1,000 components, whereas the current 8-series only has 344 - which proves more complex devices can be developed with a decreasing number of components.

Intel is currently looking at technologies which could increase the density of the chip and has said the timeline for Moore's Law has always been an estimate.